Desideratum
by That.Other.Boleyn.Girl
Summary: Some things are unforgivable. Holmes/Watson, Two-Shot, slash.
1. Part I

**A/N: My first foray into the minefield that is **_**Sherlock Holmes**_** angst. As such, I'm actually quite apprehensive – I've used a writing style I usually reserve for my **_**Naruto**_** stories, but meh. Too late now.**

**Disclaimer: **I don't own them. I only like to play with them.

**Please don't forget to review!**

**

* * *

**

**Desideratum**

0-0-0

Part I

0-0-0

John Watson marries on a Sunday morning, early, collar starched beneath his dress coat.

He's smiling in the photograph. Caught somewhere half-way to a genuine laugh, his eyebrows arched up and his head held proud, a tiny flash of teeth underneath his moustache. The monochrome doesn't do justice to him; there's gold in that hair, and blue in those eyes, and a happiness so bright it would blind any camera, bleach out all else on a negative.

Holmes knows.

The letter says _Hope you are doing well, Holmes_. That's Watson's writing, a smooth, neat scrawl, the peculiar loop he has to his 'l's. Holmes can see him, his satinwood writing desk; can imagine the black smudge of ink on his thumb, his favourite white shirt, his sleeves pushed to his elbows, each delicate strand of blond hair on his arm. Holmes can see him. The nape of Watson's neck, and his throat. The way he flicks his eyes up to refill his Gillot. Holmes can see him, the troubled little perch of his brows, can smell the half-drained cup of coffee and the earthy scent of Watson's tobacco and the ink-smell (_Hope you are doing well_) and the scratch of the pen nib as Watson writes _Holmes._

The letter says _Hope you are doing well, Holmes._

It's a pretext, a gentrified excuse. Holmes stares, and then burns it. The photograph, too.

0-0-0

It comes back, Watson smiling, beautiful, except this time Holmes is dozing for the first time in weeks and the look of the cremated photograph is stuttered, is grainy, impossibly raw.

John Watson is smiling like the end of the world.

Holmes falls into it, graceless, a white-hot oblivion where he is folding his hands over Watson's jaw. He is learning the broad sweep of Watson's cheekbones and John Watson is silent, allowing him to. He is tracing a thumb over Watson's nose and then up to his brow, memorising the angles, his fingers pressed flush over the edge of one eye that's fixed only on him, and it dizzies, it blows. John Watson says nothing when Holmes kisses him, slow. Twists a hand to his hair, to the collar below, to the buttons; then finally down to the belt.

Watson lets him, and when Holmes jerks awake on the divan Mrs Hudson is making breakfast on the level below. Outside, street-carts clatter; an alley-cat yowls. It's November.

Six months that John Watson's been gone.

0-0-0

Watson's delighted to see him, blue eyes and a smile. A relief in the way that he says the name. "Holmes."

Holmes is dirty, soot-smothered, a hole in his coat. He's wet, too. River-mud clings like tar to his boots. It takes Watson five seconds to register this, and when Holmes says, "Ah, Watson," it comes out ecru, too unprocessed. Watson takes a step back from the door.

"Well, come in. Fell into the Thames, did you?"

"A case, merely," and that's not entirely true. It's _a case_. It's not _merely_. Not when Holmes is alone. "An unforeseen development involving a dock and a barrel of creosote, but aside from that, nothing unusual."

"Nothing unusual! You're dripping all over my floor."

"Do you mind?"

Watson smiles, second time. Holmes wants to kiss him. "No."

Mary's out and Watson leads him straight to the parlour, gestures him into a sabre-leg chair. It's a good choice; the seat Georgian canework, no silk. The armrests worn. Holmes puts his hands over the dark, scrolled wood, thinks briefly that Watson's palms made the calluses there, in the oak. The thought trembles.

Something desultory is happening and Holmes doesn't hear (Watson's voice saying "Stay", and "hot tea", and "dry clothes"), and then the room is empty, scooped out, morose. The air is the smell of Watson's air. Holmes steeps himself in it, immerses himself; there's the splay of a hand-knotted rug on the floor, the design geometric, extremely bourgeois, and Holmes thinks with a fondness that Watson's taste is the same, unimproved. Mary hasn't quite reached him there, yet. Thank God. But she's there in the wallpaper, chairs; in the drapes that are brushed to crisp cleanness, the paintings, the faint sentimentality in a Renaissance vase. A feminine patina over every edge, every line. Blunting things. Holmes decides he doesn't like it, not a single thing, besides the rug; decides he wants to take it apart at the seams and fill it with things Mary Morstan hasn't heard of before, the entire room full of Spanish and Mudéjar screens, stained-glass lampshades, a spade-backed Hepplewhite chair, Queen Anne candlesticks and dust-covered Arabic tomes, an orrery, French commodes and Gothic birdcages. Holmes wants Tanagra figurines and an Empire centrepiece, silver putti with medallions glinting white-fierce beneath, and an armoire with trelliswork parquetry and a _cassone_ with stucco and bronze-gilt feet. Holmes wants beauty and a blunt, irreverent mess. Holmes wants Watson. The last, more than anything else.

"Hope this fits you; I think I've put on some weight," and Watson's back again. Holmes snaps his head up to see. "I'd run you a bath but you never used to like those things. Unless these six months have seen you reform on me?"

"I don't reform," Holmes reminds him. "And you _have_ put on weight. Seven pounds."

"Seven precisely?"

"Precisely."

"I see."

Watson's grinning, a boyish, effulgent grin that's familiar, that Holmes has gone half a year without seeing. It steals straight to his centre, stays quietly, stings. The shirt's white. Holmes catches it; a towel follows suit, a pair of dun trousers, belt tossed playfully towards his head.

"No waistcoat?" Holmes says, pushing his luck again. He can catch the hard scent of lye soap from the shirt. "You have terrible hospitality, old boy."

Watson snorts at him. "I know I shan't see those clothes again. I'm not willing to add a waistcoat to the sacrifice. Are you very wet?"

"Not very."

"Perhaps I had best get the fire up, nonetheless."

"I suppose; I can hang my clothes to dry on that hook just there."

"If they are worth drying at all," Watson points out, but he's already at the coal scuttle, poker in hand. The fire drips a warm glow across his back. "At the present moment, Holmes, I'm more inclined towards burning them to save Mrs Hudson from cardiac arrest."

It's so ordinary, time-honoured, this exchange of theirs; Watson's spine spells a patchwork of memories in the way that it arcs by the fireplace. Holmes peels off his jacket, cravat, then his braces. The cloth is a wet sound against the dark rug.

"If you burn them, old boy, you shall have to provide me a waistcoat."

"I shouldn't be surprised if you're wearing one of my waistcoats already. A large number of them mysteriously disappeared from the boxes I'd packed before leaving Baker Street."

Holmes remembers the darkness, Watson asleep in his room, the silent unclasping of a portmanteau latch. The small, stolen stack buried deep in his closet. Holmes remembers each suit the waistcoats match, remembers thinking that Watson would come back to retrieve them, someday. He's never worn them, despite what Watson might think.

"Would you prefer me to return them?" he says, though he doesn't intend to.

Watson knows this. "No, my dear fellow; I shan't fit them now, anyway. And you were never much good at returning things in any condition nearing satisfactory."

"You besmirch me."

"Hardly. I know you too well."

Holmes is feeling masochistic, so he prods shamelessly, if only to hear Watson's voice. "Name an instance."

Watson pauses. Coal clumps hiss _a cappella_ into the chimney, the smoke susurrating in ponderous whorls. Despite the fire Holmes feels that the room is cooling, turning opiate, the soft shade of _clair de lune_.

"Well, for one, Holmes, you never returned any of my letters."

This is true, almost inescapably so. Watson's back is an infallible, polite presentation as Holmes shrugs his shoulders out from beneath a damp shirt.

There's a silence. Holmes breaks it, eventually.

"I've been occupied;" studiously careless, remote. "I've had cases. Moriarty. And you've had your Mary. I did not think it my station to encroach on your domestic life."

Watson's frowning now; Holmes can read it too easily, the taut snag of the shoulders, transpicuous. The fire vaunts a roar of sparks onto the hearthrug and Holmes shunts borrowed trousers up over his hips. The belt snaps through the belt-loops. Watson's still turned away.

"Holmes, I cannot see how Mary comes into all this. You still could have written."

"I had nothing to say."

"I find that hard to believe," and the voice is startlingly angry. Holmes loses the tide of his breath for a second. "It's been six months, Holmes; you cannot still begrudge me my marriage to Mary after all this time."

_Yes, I can._ "I begrudge you nothing, Watson."

"If so, then why did you not write?"

"You did not visit." Holmes points this out as one would a dead body, a corpse found floating the breast of the Thames. "I extrapolated, old boy, on the data presented. I concluded you wished nothing more to do with me."

The surprise comes first, the temporary slick of guilt; and then fury emerges in blocks of restraint, in tight fists balled deep into grey trouser pockets. John Watson doesn't let this side of him reign – lets it simmer instead, a faint adumbration that's caught in the cage of a grey-blue gaze. The cords of light muscle down the length of his arms are hypnotic. Holmes thrills with it, the thought of John Watson angry, a trumeau between rapture and plangent dismay.

"Your conclusion was invalid," Watson says in time. He's polite, in the way that he is when irate; Holmes knows that he's trying to avoid a fight, circumvent it. "I did not wish that at all."

"You did not?"

"I did not. And neither did Mary."

Holmes needles his cuffs. Mary's name is a chafe. "Did you rusticate for some time in the country, then? That is the only explanation I can supply for your avoidance of me."

Watson starts forward from the fireplace, hands emerging to grip the mantel, tight. Holmes' eyes stipple over him, vaguely assessing. The voice, when it comes, is incredulous.

"_My_ avoidance of _you_ is hardly the case. You did not even present at my wedding, Holmes."

"You seemed not to resent that at the time, if I recall correctly. You appeared only too happy in the photograph you sent."

"A photograph, and a letter, to which you _did not reply_."

"As I've stated already, I was engaged in a case."

"Too engaged, apparently, to even jot back a note of congratulations."

The fight is happening; Holmes feeds it with a kind of glee, knowing that the full brunt of Watson's concentration is fixed on him and him only, with only cursory lapses to Mary. There's a jarring tension in Watson's jaw; Holmes longs to palpate it – bottle it, perhaps.

"Would my congratulations have pleased you, if given unwillingly?"

Watson scoffs, a disdainful disbelief. "I cannot comprehend you. Are you so unwilling to see me happy, Holmes?"

"_Are_ you happy?"

It's superfluous; the answer is clear. In the Dresden china on the mantelpiece Holmes sees peace, sees contentment, domesticity. Watson's eyes have turned sharp now, a thin slip of steel, and the air is viscous as Holmes pushes up from his seat. He doesn't want to be sitting when the moment comes, when the word tips deliberate from Watson's lips.

"Yes." And there it is, like a stake. "I am, Holmes."

Holmes knows this already, so he's braced for it, waiting. It doesn't hurt him as deep as it used to, once. He shrugs blithely, an adscititious lie; Watson's leant by the console, mouth grim and set, and Holmes knows that he's gone but still Holmes wants him blindly, wants the way Watson glares from beneath dark blond lashes, wants the secretive hollow of Watson's neck. Watson's solid and Holmes is tempolabile, and in Watson's stability there's some sort of pledge. It's a pledge that, for Holmes, negates everything else – negates Mary, negates even the wedding ring. Negates Watson's smile in that photograph, Watson's eyes the blue of celadon glaze, Watson's laughter crystallised onto a sheet of paper over something, over someone, other than Holmes. Negates all of Holmes' own deductions and counter-deductions; his syllogisms and his sophistry, his probes into Watson and into himself that yield nothing but tor-tangled suppositions, a bleak field where Logic holds no sway. In the all-encompassing human mire only Watson stands still – only Watson exists. Holmes sees him, a lodestar, ubiquitous; and when Watson's arms cross over the front of his chest, his mouth opening to venture some afflictive truth, Holmes takes the three irrevocable steps and kisses that truth back down and away.

Watson locks.

Holmes feels it, a grinding halt in the limbs. He rations himself; he's off Watson's lips before Watson has had time to push him away, to think. The room all around is a tenuous brace and Holmes reels to the door in _sauve qui peut_, and the last thing he sees is a lambent gleam, the bright catch of gold that is Watson's ring.

0-0-0

It's enough for a harem of dizzying nights, sleep held off by the needle and Watson's face. Holmes rakes at the violin like short gasps of breath, the remembrance of Watson's mouth against his a hot scalding against the inside of his ribs.

0-0-0

A week sidles; then Watson is there in the doorway, crossing over the Herez like Tisiphone.

The first hit to the jaw is vitriolic. Holmes feels his head snap to the side with it, feels the quick whip of blood, tastes it there on his lip. Watson's eyes are a furious, storm-addled grey and the second blow snags Holmes low in the chest, knocks him backward against the Baroque bookcase.

"I am _married_," is the first thing Watson says, and then his cane is across Holmes' collarbones and his mouth is a vengeful, bitter descent. Holmes meets him with teeth and voracity, with a drowning despair that sinks ruthlessly deep. There's the scent of char-smoke in Watson's shirt. Holmes wraps a hand into a waistcoat pocket, the rasp of lost bets against the backs of his fingers; there's a violence in the bone of Watson's hips and Holmes arcs his spine like a jet of spray, lets the feel of John Watson saturate him. Watson tastes like cheap gin and depravity, like the bruises Holmes knows he will have in the morning. Holmes wants him. Holmes wants him, exactly like this.

"I am married."

Holmes needs no reminder of that, and while Watson is trying to catch his breath Holmes is pulling him, dragging off buttons and belts. Watson's throat is a terse, closed-off domain and Holmes presses his lips to the pulse bucking there, shuts his eyes, carves the memory of Watson's breath as it quickens above him deep into his mind. Watson's cane slides away like a final pretence and then Watson's gloved hands are along Holmes' waist.

"I am _married_."

Holmes pitches their two bodies closer, moulds his mouth over Watson's to silence him.

0-0-0

There's no gentle quarter to any of it, just a furious, fathomless, telic event.

When it ends Holmes is dappled with purple-edged bites, Watson's arm slung a warm weight across his chest. The day sifts through the windows like ambergris. They say nothing.

Not even when Watson leaves.

0-0-0

Holmes doesn't move from the settee for almost a week, not eating, enchasing his arm with needle-pricks. The bites Watson left are a Gentian blue and Holmes submerges in heady, narcotic fevers, his eyes dark, tenebrous, his fired limbs trilling. His violin hawks denial and jagged misgivings and the notes come out gauntly, serrated and thin.

There are times when Holmes finds his mind painfully clean, when morphia has trickled away from his skin and John Watson emerges, a terrible dream. Watson's anger is a gimlet-eyed incubus that seeps slowly, a raggedly beautiful thing. This is a side of John Watson only Holmes has seen; in cases, with Watson's swordstick singing, a visceral sort of brutality that is riveting because it's so out-of-place in him. In arguments, too, when Holmes is winning – not because Holmes is right, because he usually isn't, but because he's a doyen in informal fallacies, in pointing out Watson's and neglecting his own – then comes the sudden lash of viciousness, Watson's eyes snapping briskly above gritted teeth. The culmination is bruises and knuckle-split lips, heated fist-fights that finish ambiguously. Holmes knows the way Watson swipes a hand over his cheek when it's over; knows the way Watson's eyes cool, a bit guilty, turn introspective and puzzled, an apology.

Holmes knows, and he pushes incessantly; because beneath the trim waistcoat and propriety is a facet of Watson he desperately needs, seeks to claim.

Watson's smiles belong to Mary.

But this side of John Watson belongs only to Holmes.

0-0-0

Mary visits and Holmes is wilfully gauche, too biting. Too caustic, too viperish. She's pretty, pragmatic, and precatory, and when she asks him what the matter with Watson is, Holmes occludes her politely and asks her to leave.

A day later and Watson is there as well. There's a light sheen of snow on his overcoat, frost aster-like on his lashes and hair; more sober, reserved, hat still on, necktie straight. Holmes is stilted from seven-percent solution, his breathing aflutter and his eyes half-closed. He knows what Watson is trying to do. Preciosity lingers in Watson's jaw, the still stone of a Delphic oracle.

"I came to – " and Watson falters there, scripted words abdicating themselves. Watson's mouth is a cold-bitten, motion-flushed red. "Are you well?"

"You came back."

It's not an answer, Holmes knows, but Watson accepts it anyway. "Yes, I did."

A quiet moment passes like ether between them, Watson framed by the doorjamb, a grey silhouette. A tense note is in Watson's shoulders, his neck; Holmes is trembling from longing and too much cocaine, the pads of his fingers a hollow panache.

"Won't you sit?"

"I shan't stay," Watson tells him too sharp, and the head is dipped low down over the chest, blue eyes hidden beneath the felt brim of the hat.

Holmes flicks a hand at him, tremulous. "Not even for tea?"

"Mary's waiting. She's in a hansom outside."

It smarts faintly. Holmes tips himself semi-upright; his voice lilts. The words chase a falsified grin, dissipating too quickly to really subsist.

"You would choose her above me, Watson?"

"I have already chosen her above you, Holmes."

"Ah." Holmes swallows, tells himself it is nothing. "I see. Is that why you have come here today?"

"Yes. It is."

He needs to hear it from Watson's lips. "So you love her?"

Watson's answering smile is stiff, slightly cutting. "Are you not the master of deduction, Holmes? Or have I placed too much faith in your skills to date?"

"I cannot read you," Holmes shrugs, and his fingertips lean. The ballast in his chest is sinking slowly, taut memories of Watson's mouth on his skin. "You have provided me with too much conflicting material. I'm afraid I cannot discern head or tail of it, though I believe I've made more than significant progress."

"You must enlighten me as to what you've discovered so far."

"You know I never share my cases while they're still incomplete."

"I'm not a _case_," Watson hisses then, and Holmes notes with a start that Watson's eyes have turned agate-grey, a bristling, beauteous, glimmering flint. "I am _human_, Holmes, and I live, I breathe, I _feel_ – which is more than apparently can be said of _you_ – "

"That is insensitive, Watson, and you know it's not true – "

"You came to my _house_," Watson snarls; and he's crossing the threshold, his cane stabbing into the fine Persian rug. Holmes sucks an unprepared breath from his place on the settee. "You came to the house in which I live with my _wife_, and you – _committed_ yourself to destroying my happiness, to deliberately poisoning my relationship with Mary. You cannot deny it, Holmes. You cannot _dare_ deny it in front of me."

The breath shivers, anticipatory, from Holmes' lungs. Watson's close, too close; Holmes' world is keening, too gaudy, too clouded, and much too clamant. Watson's standing just barely a metre away and Holmes thinks if he stretches out his fingers they will touch Watson's waistcoat, brush along his watch chain.

"It was you who came to my rooms last week, Watson." His sight skitters. "I did not seek you."

"I'd had too much to drink."

Holmes knows this already, this final panacea for everything between them to be forgotten, eclipsed. Another excuse – Watson has a repertoire of them, rusted keys to be tossed, to be buried away.

"But you were not drunk," Holmes says, and it doesn't quite matter. "You'd had but a glass or two of whiskey, and only a quart of a bottle of gin – "

"My judgement had been severely impaired;" and Watson doesn't ask why Holmes seems to know all this.

"I would not call it impairment; I would call it _instinct_."

Watson's mouth bunches into a sardonic knot by his cheek. "It is indeed Mankind's deepest instinct to _sin._"

"This is no sin," and Holmes reaches for Watson's shirt. The cane immediately knocks his wrist away, Watson investing enough force into the blow to sting. "You chose me that night. You did not choose Mary."

"Because I _love_ Mary; I would never hurt her that way."

Those are the dread words for Holmes – the capital sentence. Holmes twists his hand sideways, gets a grip on the cane, wrenches Watson down hard. "And yet, you'd hurt _me_."

"I do not love you."

Pain twitches along Watson's jaw from his knee but Holmes has him at eye-level, and that's enough, at least.

"Yes, you do," Holmes says to John Watson. "You _do_."

The kiss comes too savage; Watson breaks it too quick. Holmes keeps his hands on either side of Watson's jaw, brings his mouth back forcefully down again, roughly catches Watson's lower lip in his teeth. Watson's eyes are the blue-tinted colour of pitch, crackling fierce and ferocious and Holmes doesn't care. He doesn't. Let John Watson's thoughts flinch towards Mary – to her curls and her freckles and her eyes of dark green – let them linger there, fester there, and Holmes won't complain; not now. Not when Watson's mouth is so near, not when the warmth of John Watson's coat and his body is assaulting Holmes in battering waves. Not now. Watson's mouth is malignant, unravelling, Watson's hand gripping Holmes' hip like a vice. There's the slam of cocaine in Holmes' blood vessels and the slam of John Watson not too far below. There's pain; very sharp; Watson's teeth, Watson's tongue. Holmes slips a hand underneath Watson's folded collar and his thumb is on the very first button when Watson finally shoves him away.

"_You_," Watson's hissing, charged and terribly low, "will _stop this._"

Holmes is breathing too hard. "You asked for the progress I'd made in the matter; I gave it to you. Those are all my conclusions."

"You will _stop_."

Watson's eyes hold a heated coal that's propped by a flagrant, vituperative note. There's blood on his lip – it's probably Holmes', red on kiss-bruised red, a peccant symbol imbrued. Holmes stares as Watson pushes up from the floor. The door trembles; Watson forms a tight hand on the knob. The hall drapes a faint light over Watson's form, a dove-grey that seems to hover above his dark coat.

Holmes finds his voice again in Watson's shoulder-blades, in the graceful hardness of cloth-covered bone. "I will not."

"I have no desire to accompany you into insanity, Holmes," and Watson is harsh, brooking nothing at all.

"You don't love her, Watson. You know you cannot."

Watson pauses, turns just the slightest angle; candescence blinks over the still of his profile, his voice very quiet, indelible. Holmes is trapped by the glancing light off his lashes, the smooth, unattainable curve of his throat. The door slams like contusion; the dark creases and folds.

"I _can_," Watson says from outside in the hall; and it's gelid, forbidding. A terrible oath.

0-0-0

Mary's back is the colour of aquarelle beige, pale skin daubed with the light scent of jessamine. She's an elegant harbour of linen-draped curves; a soft pliancy in the fan of her hair, the sound of her breath a mellifluous tide that turns muted and mellow as she drifts into sleep.

Watson thinks that Mary is something unearthly, an ethereal being with eyes _terre verte_ that falls like a salve over all of his wounds. She is patient, forgiving, a love in her smile that is hallowed and irreplaceable. She has learnt all of Watson's vulnerable moments; six months of compassion and gentleness, and the feel of her hand sweeping over his forehead is a blissful sink into Providence.

Holmes is different.

Holmes is reckless and wildly tangential and the mordant texture of something unknown, sharp angles and plunges to _chiaroscuro_. Holmes is the flare of a wick that's left burning; Holmes is the scythe of a blackened impulse, his eyes never landing for more than a minute, his fingers despotic, his mouth too corrupt. There's the rampant leap in the fire-flight eyes, the quick twist of the head when a fact is made known – there's the malice, the spiteful desire to hurt, the half-cloaked look of defencelessness when Watson decides to hurt back in return. Holmes is barbed, a baccantic hook in the earth. Watson lies on the bed beside the form of his wife and the clock wheedles twelve, and then one, and then two, and the desperate look in Holmes' eyes is painted across the expanse of the roof. Those are nights when John Watson cannot fall asleep, and the morning sees him snappish and temper-short, the feel of his thumb inside Holmes' mouth a remembrance he'd much rather do without.

Mary's empyreal and Holmes is darkly terrene; and while Watson loves Mary with all of his heart something brutal, flagitious, tugs him down towards Holmes.

Holmes' back is a myriad of memory-flayed bruises and Watson finds that he cannot forget it, now.

Holmes has done this.

Some things are unforgivable.

* * *

**A/N: More Watson in the next chapter, which should be up in a week. It's already written - I just need to do some polishing. **

**You can also follow this story on LiveJournal – I'm at knowmydark [dot] livejournal [dot] com. Updates usually appear there first before they appear here, and I also stick previews and things like that there too… so add me!**

**Reviews are love! Tell me what you think!**


	2. Part II

**A/N: Less verbosity in this one, because Watson's the main focus, and for some reason I don't associate him with extremely lyrical prose. O.o Weird. But anyway. The change should, hopefully, be refreshing, instead of annoying...? Or maybe just annoying. I don't know.**

**Thanks to all my reviewers of Part I: Kyla45, ShadedRogue, Peschi, Kaiho Neko, Positively, mildetryth, janinePSA, Hash Pipe, Holmesie Lemonade, lyssaloulou, desalina90, BookWormNiri, adevotedreader, SutaakiHitori, blanc-hiver, Nuitari Aquarius, Frankie and ask, Curreeus, Lucy'sDaydreams, LynLin, GiggleFunny, ripplinwaters, and sondre!**

**Please don't forget to review!**

**

* * *

**

**Desideratum**

0-0-0

Part II

0-0-0

The thoughts come on jilted and juxtaposed, and Holmes finds himself shuffling interminably through memories as ordered as copperplate prose.

Holmes thinks he would like to renounce it all, take the sheaf of figurative newspaper clippings and scatter them, burn them, decimate them whole. Burn the moments of soul-stifled fascination, Watson with his braces framing his hips and his boots kicked up in front of a paper, steel pen hitched loosely between his teeth; Watson falling asleep by the sitting room fire, hat tipping, book sliding its way down his lap. Burn the stickling exchanges, the tête-à-têtes over tea; the habit Watson has of rocking back on his heels when he's speechless, Watson straightening when Holmes enters a room. Burn the soft smile that Watson only deigns to wear when he decides to, _only this once_, indulge Holmes. Burn the numerous locks on the wardrobe doors, that were never enough to keep Sherlock Holmes out; burn the dog, _their_ dog, unconscious or not; burn the telegrams, the already-half-burnt chair cushions, the pile of _The Times_ in the study room corner that dates all the way back to 1881. Burn the way Watson always snaps around to look whenever a gunshot sounds anywhere remotely near Holmes. Burn the holes and the gashes and the horrific, taupe bruises, and Watson's form on a dingy dock-front, palm thrown up, the single word rending itself as it echoes, the one man Watson cares about enough to warn.

_Holmes!_

Burn the dinners, the black tie and tails. Burn the operas, _Rigoletto_ and _Norma_ and _Faust_, Watson leaning across on a Saturday evening to straighten the front of Holmes' (stolen) waistcoat.

Burn it all.

Burn everything John Watson has said –

_As your friend..._

_You're not human!_

_I do not love you._

_Holmes!_

Burn the sting of John Watson's cane on his wrist and the giddying taste of John Watson's mouth and by the time all that's burnt, by the time all that's gone, Holmes has nothing.

Just a needle and an opened glass vial.

0-0-0

Holmes haunts a barghest through Watson's thoughts, the dreams misshapen and too grotesque, the taste of Holmes on Watson's tongue a lacerating tantivy. There's no continuity to any of it – just blots of scenes in sharp relief, the snatch of Holmes' eyes, his teeth, the trenchant scrape of Holmes' nails across the back of Watson's skin. Holmes is arched and darkled there – a hiss between the bruising lips – and Watson slams up into him, the hitch of pain from Holmes' throat choked down by Watson's mouth on his; pernicious, the curve of Holmes' hip a wanton, bare profanity. There's nothing good, no sacredness, no testament to God or grace; and Watson wakes to sweat-soaked sheets, the pound of culpability.

The grit in Sherlock Holmes' smile crowds Mary down to nothingness.

To counter it, John Watson drinks – unchains his rankest innermost vices, thumbs their discord down his limbs. The shriek of cards and fights and gin slash ink across a white canvas. Some days the smoke and clamouring screams evoke Holmes in a grandeur hallucinatory, his shrewd eyes and the red of his busted lip, his knuckles blistering the gaslight air and dirt-sweat winging his shoulder-blades. Some days Holmes has his shirt peeled back, his fingers deep in Watson's hair, his thighs clenched bare round Watson's hips hard enough to leave bruises on pale-hued skin – and Watson sinks, sinks helplessly, dissoluteness that delves him straight into delusion, blank squares filled with _Holmes_ and _Holmes_ and _Holmes_ that build a finale, a shuddering roar.

There's no surprise when Mary leaves. It's a conglomerate of little things, engagements Watson's forgotten or missed, late nights and Mary awake, alone, Mary seated silent and much too still with a supper spread for two, untouched. She says nothing about it; she pardons him. She's kind, too kind, her gentleness more terrible than open hate – and Watson feels her pity there, the kiss she cools upon his cheek.

The ring remains, a promise, dead.

And Holmes, snarled there in everything.

0-0-0

Holmes is folded like an argument in the corner of the sitting room, the comma of his hair too damp, a dark wet plaster over his skin. His arm snakes out from frayed shirt-sleeves. Bullet holes staccato over the ceiling, dank pits that echo Holmes' wrist, and Watson sets his cane aside to slope against the cabinet.

"Watson."

The name is stitched and thin, the borders of the consonants scuffed down to sawdust by cocaine. The timepiece on the mantel cranks.

"She left."

This, too, is polished, strained, and Watson lets the bitterness command the sneer that shapes his lips. "Yes, Holmes, she did. How perceptive of you."

"This morning?"

"Yesterday afternoon."

Holmes shifts, shirt crumpled over his chest. Watson can see the trembling soar that scintillates in Holmes' face, a hope that pounces much too fast before Holmes remembers to reel it in.

"You have my deepest condolences, then," Holmes says. His eyes dart, too nomadic. "She has gone to see her parents, yes? They live in Brighton, I believe. She mentioned them last time she visited. How long does she plan to stay away?"

"Six months."

"That long?"

Watson has no answer to that; it feels still altogether raw, the wound still opened up to the air. Six months is the time Holmes stayed away, the foggy stretch of happiness – six months of violets, embroidery, the copper tumble of Mary's hair and her gloves, her bonnets, shoes, her fan. Six months and nothing there beneath, no blighted, half-formed, murky need. Six months. It taints, a slavish thrum that's Holmes and inculcated. Steep.

The brimstone's there in Holmes' eyes, distracting and Damoclean; and Watson shirks his sight away when Holmes grabs at a basket-seat.

"Won't you sit?" and Holmes sinks into it. His fingers flit over the wickerwork. "Since Mary cannot possibly be waiting for you outside in a hansom cab."

The laugh barks low and acerbic. "You're rather contented with this turn of events, I see."

"Does my content come into the equation, Watson?"

"Not so much your _con_tent as your _in_tent, Holmes."

The chink presents in Holmes' pause, the sway beneath the dark-shaped brows. The column that is Holmes' throat is white, a pale, precarious thing. "You blame me for this."

"Would you dispute that blame?"

"I have not disputed anything."

"You do not have to. It is already done."

Holmes' mouth jerks from his place by the hearth; his fingertips splutter across the chair arm, eyes scratching there at Watson's face. There's gold on the tips of Holmes' hair, sun reaming cracks between the drapes. There's light seized in the crook of Holmes' neck. Watson finds his eyes caught there by the vertiginous gutter of collar-bare skin; hot anger and a dark frustration balls his hands tight into fists.

"You must be clearer," Holmes says at last, steady. "Outline for me _what_ has already been done."

"Is it not yet clear enough for you? I've _lost Mary_."

"You did not lose her, Watson. You chose to force her away; there is a distinct difference between the two."

It's a truth that whets a fierce dismay, a haul from deep in Watson's spine. The gape of Holmes' shirtsleeves is a basal beck from fifteen feet.

"You made the choice on my behalf – "

"I presented you with data, nothing more. You made your own decisions."

"_I_ chose _Mary_, I did not choose _you_. I chose her the moment I put that ring on her finger, Holmes, and you saw that, and you sought to _break my promise to her_ – "

"I sought nothing except to make you see reason – "

"I don't _want_ your reason!"

Holmes pauses. The sun slants down his neck, erratic, straggling on his pulse. Watson feels his throat clamp closed when Holmes tips up from the basket-chair, the char-print eyes too volatile. Too torqued, too irrefrangible. Too close.

"What would you ask of me then, Watson?"

"I – what would I _ask_ of you?"

Holmes spills the desperate hint to his voice as he moves across the sitting room. "If you ask repentance, I cannot give it you. I don't repent, Watson. Not any of this."

"And what would you ask of _me_, Holmes? Forgiveness? Because I cannot give you that either."

The words are sharded, edged to hurt – and then the press of Holmes is there, the sheet of air an inch or so, the prickling phantom feel of Holmes that skates its way down Watson's neck. Watson draws a startled breath, then tamps it down behind his teeth.

"I would not presume to ask for forgiveness," Holmes says. "It is not something I have ever deserved."

The instinct nettles Watson close, the jump of Sherlock Holmes' breath fanned quick across his mouth and throat; he means the name to shape a warning, but it catches, comes out something else. "Holmes."

"But still you came back. Again."

"I am not here for the reason that you suppose."

"But you are not with Mary either," and when Holmes tilts forward Watson halts him with a forearm across his ribs. "You have not followed her to Brighton, as any other husband would have done."

"I am not here for _you_," Watson snaps then, and a hot twitch of panic cores into his gut.

"If you are not, then what _are_ you here for, Watson?"

"I'm – "

To his surprise the words evaporate, leave only an eschar of dread on his tongue. He can feel them, canted out of reach; canted by the scent of Holmes, his warmth, his pupils flared and blown. When Holmes tilts up a second time the brace from Watson's arm is firm, the heel of Watson's hand a rampart ridged across the collarbone.

Holmes lilts it like a litany, his eyes still trained on Watson's mouth. "You've still to answer me, Watson."

_I have no answer. _"The question lacks relevance."

"It lacks nothing except a truthful response."

"I am here, am I not?" but the bite's derailed by the ride of the apple of Holmes' throat. Watson's shaking, a buzz pithed under his skin. "Regardless of motive, I am here nonetheless."

Holmes pauses as if to consider this; Watson catches a "Yes, I suppose you're right", and then Holmes is tilting up one last time and the shock of wet on Watson's jaw is an unexpected, jolting hook. It stirs things – a tortured, black recall; Holmes spread across the teak floorboards, mouth tugged open, saliva-slick – and Watson grabs a tight handful of Holmes' shirt to earth himself.

"_Stop_," he gets out, much too late. "Holmes, _stop_ – "

"I've never doubted you."

It's caught – hung there, the moment culled, the look in Sherlock Holmes' eyes a quaver black and pruinose; and Watson feels his chest knot closed at those four unexpected, artless words, the wrest of paper wedding vows deraigned by Holmes' open mouth. There's rage, the weal of blunt despair; the part down Watson's waistcoat front; the snaring hash of Holmes' hair, the sun (_I've never doubted you_) cragged over Holmes' white cheekbone; then soot, the taste of Sherlock Holmes, the moan that shivers Watson's teeth and scours its way all down his throat. Holmes sounds like sand and coal-dust, salt, his hands too fast and much too slow. Holmes sounds like ripping fabric, belt. Holmes sounds like Cerberus, like Hell, the pit beyond the Phlegethon; and Watson digs his fingers down against the bone of Holmes' hip, bites hard, draws blood off Holmes' tongue, thinks that if his soul is damned to Hell at least he won't be damned alone.

0-0-0

The sheets are irretrievable. Holmes lights his pipe, brows puckered low, and says, "I've never doubted you."

0-0-0

Mary writes two times a week, each note penned skewer-neat and short.

Watson finds he can't read them, can't go beyond the envelope; the letters on the escritoire still folded, crisp, and unopened. He thinks that he should answer them, scratch gallant lies in parchment print, a mock of every scratch mauled raw by Holmes' nails along his spine. He thinks that he should burn them, too.

He thinks.

But still, the letters stay.

Holmes visits, jacket much too large, his cuffs a gash of cotton-white against the dark of pockets, coat. His smile is something drossy, small, daedal in its worthlessness – a plaster cast on marble. Spiked. The flicker left in Holmes' wake stamps scarlet over every line, the dreaded 'A' emblazoned, gules, on every surface left exposed. John Watson sits when Holmes is gone and kicks the buttons from the boards, the weight of every _Dearest John_ left scudding in the letter drawer.

0-0-0

Three months and Holmes is opium-slow, damp blankets swarming up his hips. His fingers trail on Watson's chest and Watson's staring at the wall, the panelled wood of Baker Street, smoke-stained and desquamating, clawed.

"You've lost the rent," Holmes says at last.

This is something Watson knows; to hear it in the open air is gall, a loaded mangonel.

"I have." The ghost of twenty pounds lends jaggedness to Watson's mouth.

"Is Mrs Turner aware of such?"

"She is not."

Holmes brands a shallow kiss against the meat of Watson's arm. "Will you not take up your old rooms here? I've left the furnishings untouched. You could be settled here comfortably before the week is out."

This is a conversation they've had before, the cards played out in habile loops; Holmes knows the scope of Watson's hand and Watson knows too much of Holmes, his cankered, twisting arguments, his words that pin and pry and probe. The question's never fully voiced beyond the hest in Holmes' eye, and Watson doesn't answer it. The surface ones are much more safe.

"No."

"You haven't even considered it."

"I've considered, and I've decided against it, Holmes." Watson's tone is pitched too harsh, a grate against the linen sheets. "I shan't have Mary come back from Brighton to find some denizen in Cavendish Place."

"So you believe that she'll return to you?"

It sounds a curious, notional thing, like Holmes has only just thought of it. John Watson knows this isn't true; knows that Holmes has rinsed this single thing innumerably around his brain, one tiny edge to the Charybdis that lurks in all they dare not say.

"You've had too much morphia," Watson snaps, and makes to shove himself away. "You're not remotely fit for company."

"I'm fit enough for yours, Watson."

"I'll return when you're in your right mind again."

"I'm always in my right mind," Holmes replies, and makes a snatch at Watson's wrist. His fingertips are slate-cool, slim, the reedy rasp of ink-stained skin. "The question was valid. You've no excuse not to answer it."

"I don't require an excuse not to answer your questions," and Watson's wrenching off the bed, eyes vespine in the dim half-light. The waistcoat's shrugged against a wall; Watson swipes it, shakes it out. The watch and chain are hours gone, curled in the pocket of a Chinaman with whiskers and two fives in dice, and Watson thinks it's much too late to try and fix this part of him.

Holmes tips his head. "She won't come back."

"She will."

"She won't. I'm sure of it."

Watson stops. With Holmes the words are knives, honed sharp. Even in the morphia-haze the eyes are smudged a charnel black; within them crouch brute certainty, truths lacquered, marked, and stored away. It stings that Holmes should know so well the fears that scratch in Watson's chest.

"She _will._" It's bitten, riled contempt, denial gummed to half-formed rage. "Perhaps you've such little experience with goodness that you cannot recognise it in someone else."

"I have no use for goodness; it's inexact."

"You've no use for anything except _yourself_," and Watson shies it, hard, like a blow. The shirt is gaping, seams half-ripped; Watson drags it over his shoulders, movements rough and scurrilous. "You're incapable of seeing _any worth_ in anything beyond – beyond _dead bodies_ and _footprints_ and – "

"It was Mary who left you, Watson, not me."

The clasp of Watson's belt spits lead. "That does not alter anything I've said."

"It was _she_ who left you. It was _she_ who could not appreciate your worth; a fault that, only a moment ago, you attributed to _me_."

"I am not asking you to appreciate _my_ worth, Holmes, I am asking you to appreciate _Mary's_."

"Do you hold her worth so above your own?"

Watson takes the three steps back to the bed, grabs at his open cigarette case; Holmes watches, dark eyes scorched and sprained, and Watson barks a rankling "Yes", hot anger stuttered through his voice.

"If that is so then you do not deserve her, Watson."

"No, I do not. That is something I know already; you've no need to remind me of it again."

"You deserve _me_."

It halts things, Watson's palm paused on the head of his gold-tipped cane. Holmes hooks a hand inside Watson's belt and Watson's too surprised to stop him, latched on three words that don't make sense, the sheet of light on Holmes' shoulders burnished thick and coalesced.

"What?"

Holmes says it once again, simply, as if it's obvious.

"You deserve _me_."

"I'm not in the mood to indulge you your games," and it's the only thing Watson can think of to say. Holmes has peeled the belt back off and is sliding his hands under Watson's shirt-tails, the pads of his fingers skimming taut skin.

"It's not a game." The air skids between Watson's teeth as Holmes puts a kiss alongside his navel, the gesture rushed and slightly breathless, fever-bright beneath the opium. "You're a doctor with an extensive list of vices that do no credit at all to your esteemed profession – you drink heavily, you're a degenerate gambler, a _habitué_ of disreputable prize-fighting rings and a murderer of innumerable faceless crooks we've had the misfortune to encounter in our adventures together." The swipe of tongue up Watson's stomach checks the retort that forms on his lips. "Necessary, of course – but murder nonetheless. You know your Commandments, do you not? The sixth, I believe – _Thou shalt not kill_. You've breached that. And then there is the obvious fact that you're a sodomite and an adulterer."

This last point cuts to Watson's chest like a lance, like the parting look on Mary's face. "You are hardly in a position to condemn my vices," he snaps, "considering the ample scope of your own."

Holmes gives a crooked, couchant smile. "Precisely. We deserve each other, Watson."

"What we deserve and what we do not deserve may be left to a higher Judgement, I think."

"Have we not judgement enough to decide for ourselves?"

"I would not presume so;" right across Holmes' lips because Holmes has reared up on his knees and is briskly untangling Watson's cravat. "It is not our place to decide such things."

"It is not our place to do a lot of things, and yet we do them."

"That does not make them _right_."

"The things that are necessary aren't always right," Holmes says; "and what we are doing is necessary."

0-0-0

Holmes is at his most vulnerable when he's asleep, each wire-edged muscle gone slack in his body and the light turned imbricate down his chin.

At times, John Watson thinks in these stuttered, snatched moments that in a world of flawless symmetry he'd keep the truth a docile thing, curled dozing like a favourite cat beside a crackling fireplace. He'd tame it, file down claws and teeth; and then between himself and Holmes it would become a foregone entity.

In this world where truth is blurred at the edges there's an image glossed into Watson's ring, Holmes sparked and unpredictable but leashed, platonic, brotherly. The stubborn tilt of Holmes' chin speaks nothing more than pilfered books, ripped shirts; and Holmes' pleated smile means mischief, or a novel case, a foil that stings but doesn't bleed. In this Tantalean fantasy Holmes fills the sitting room with smoke and swears that Gladstone's just asleep. Holmes stays for toast and Ceylon tea, gripes about Watson's Armagnac, makes off with Watson's best silk slippers and raids his closet brazenly. What dangles from the slew-sly mouth is a pipe-stem, scraps of spangled cases spouted like amphigory – no longing sloughed across those eyes. No stark, corrupt necessity.

No force that spools Holmes back again, a spectre leaned across the door, the dark eyes waxed esurient and fixed on Watson's lamp-lit face.

But this _is_.

This truth is a gnarled, malicious thing, a real and brute _grotesquerie_ that smarts and smatters ruthlessly. This truth is Holmes down on his knees and Holmes bent over a writing desk and Holmes saying, much too certainly:

_You deserve __**me**__._

And yet, this truth is the clock chimed four and Watson still in Holmes' bed. Holmes is twisted there on his pale right side, bruised shoulders unaligned, unkempt, all indehiscent sweep of chest and blunted width of bone in hips. His legs engage the knotted sheets, his mouth a mute anomaly. The alertness scutched from Holmes' face leaves something open in its stead. The lines are smoothed from Holmes' brow, no rancour and no cogency; and Watson feels the time press in, the hours smudged like charcoal, skin, the shadows inked and fingered deep upon the plane of Holmes' cheek.

This is a _verso_ side to Sherlock Holmes that Watson's glimpsed but never seen. Times past he leaves the room too soon, the guilt and Holmes' baleful eyes a sharp-fanged yapping at his heels. Times past he leaves because of Mary. Her pity and her wedding ring. Her goodness.

Her.

_She won't come back._

In the watered light the words feel numb, a wound that's wreathed beneath the skin. They hurt – but softer, bearably, without the fury stoking it. The image of Mary, copper-haired, perched on the arm of Watson's chair and reading Virgil's _Aeneid_ is a fraudulent, idyllic scene, the clouds that dust at Mary's feet a vast and still-retreating thing. She sews and counts the candlesticks; she brushes Watson's hat each day. She's a portrait on the mantelpiece and three months has polished all her edges, made her image out of reach.

Watson would like to melt himself alongside all that Mary is, make Mary a viaticum to sluice out all his blackest sins – but Mary's gone and Holmes is left, a truth imperfect, incomplete.

On Holmes' once unmarred, white skin trawl bruises, scars. Faint needle-pricks. Gauze scroops around two fingers sprained in nameless gas-lit fighting rings, and Watson sits right next to him, the headboard an _éclaircissement_, the two of them a fractured echo of how things really _should have been_.

But, Watson thinks, despite it all it's the truth nonetheless.

And it's necessary.

0-0-0

The clock is poised on ten to six and Watson's still between the sheets, his shoulders braced vitrescent up against a shoal of pondered things. The smile he wears is private, thin – a drabbet-raw but heartfelt grin that's nothing perfect, nothing clean, but real.

It's just enough, at least.

0-0-0

Three weeks sees Watson back again, the portmanteaus and carpet-bags, the boxes bustling from their cabs to 221b Baker Street. Holmes hovers in the doorway, stairs, violin bow clasped behind his back, his mouth a melismatic sling that never sets on anything. He snipes at drivers, delivery boys; his smile is always just beneath, tentative but half-tamed, fierce, and Watson sees it easily.

Holmes says, half-way through all of it, "Planning to stay a long while, old boy?"

"Just the two months or so until Mary comes back;" although Watson has sold most of his furniture and Cavendish Place is leased out already.

Holmes knows this.

Watson knows he knows this.

And so the smile remains fixed between them, one other unspoken thing they share. Within it tides a current latched, a callous and vindictive thing, the remnants of those primary months on which all other months are based; patched over are the recent weeks, the fragile sheen of tolerance. It's brittle, but it's progress made.

John Watson doesn't question it.

0-0-0

In time, John Watson likes to think they've tamped their way to normalcy, a final state of equipoise that's soothing in its fluency – Holmes preconising his way through cases, the _fainéant_ mires in between, and Watson there to curb the moods that skulk there subcutaneously.

The months go by. Five months. Then six.

Mrs Mary Watson does not return.

The letters from her cease as well and in time, John Watson likes to think that Mary's purged and exorcised, a bruise left only underneath skin. She's a delicate and glass-spun thing that does not belong in Baker Street. In Baker Street lie crackling things, the flaring force to Watson's spine whenever eyes or fingers meet; the feel of Holmes' pulse trapped there within the cage of Watson's teeth. In Baker Street is Sherlock Holmes pressed up against the study door, the bite of Watson's wedding ring against the flesh above his hips. In Baker Street is Holmes' mouth, despoiling, heated, much too heaped, garrotte-wire grin snagged vespertine across the porcelain white of teeth; and fights, char-caulked and dangerous things, spun out from petty arguments that seep their way through everything.

But then, at times in Baker Street there's afternoons of autumn sun, Holmes wrapped within his dressing gown and sipping at a cup of tea. There's Watson in a chair nearby with _Morning Post_ spread on his knee, and Holmes' wrist upon his arm, and Holmes' pipe-smoke in the air, and Holmes' voice a monologue that quirks a half-reluctant smile. There's light a pearly anadem upon the soot of Holmes' hair. There's quiet like a _détente_.

There's just the two of them, alone, within the stinting of the world and Holmes' mouth is much too steep, like something lost and found at sea; but even with its snarling ease, the rapier-edge that starts and stings, his mouth fits Watson's perfectly.

And that, too, is enough, at least.

0-0-0

**The End.**

**

* * *

**

**A/N: I... have a terrible suspicion I'm going to be bashed for this chapter. I don't know why. I just have the suspicion. Maybe it's because I went through the whole (write + read + dislike immensely + re-write) cycle SIX TIMES for this Part II, that I'm still slightly unhappy with what I've ended up with, but I'm just so emotionally and physically exhausted that I can't keep it up and start a seventh cycle.**

**Sorry. I'm my own worst critic sometimes.**

**But anyway, please, please review my humble and (appropriately, I suppose, since we're dealing with the whole perfection theme) imperfect Part II! If you don't, I think I might just cry. And I'm being serious. I'm **_**that**_** tired.**

**Please.**

**PS. And please add me on LiveJournal as well – I post notifications and so forth on there.**

**(And please don't forget to review!)**


End file.
